Universal APIs

by Kin Lane on 11/19/2010

Many APIs deliver the same type of data like city, country or other factual data. Other APIs deliver similar functionality like geo-location and currency conversions.

The opportunity to develop Universal APIs or Aggregated APIs that bring together common web services into a single source is growing.

One example of API aggregation is the Deltacloud which provide aggregated access to multiple cloud computing platforms such as Rackspace and Amazon EC2 via a single web service.

Aggregation of APIs opens up opportunities to provide redundancy, deliver caching and other ways of improve API availability and performance.

Aggregators will eventually commoditize certain API services such as geo-location, IP address look-up, storage, and computing and will create markets for services such as Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. This will create competition and ultimately drive down pricing and create opportunities for bulk discounts.

API aggregation markets will lead the way for interoperability and standards among API service providers, make integration easier for developers and make it easier to manage the growing number of APIs that are being used in application development.